Currently have over 4 million subscribers and 600 million views across multiple channels on YouTube (all organic, no paid traffic).
Usually what you see is about $1 per 1000 views (CPM) for US creators. This number can be much lower depending on which country you are from - US is the highest.
Since "adpocalypse" (advertisers pulling out of YT ads) and some other relevant events, CPM has gone down significantly for everybody. While we were making about $1 CPM a couple years ago, we are now doing about $0.50 CPM.
With that said, most business-savvy YouTube creators have known from the beginning that YT ads are a drop in the bucket compared to the potential of revenue that you can make using other monetization methods. Patreon is one way, but merch, live shows, and digital products are examples of other ways that a creator can make way more money from their following.
For example, one of our channels with nearly 1 million subsribers only made about $4000 per month on YT ads at its peak. During that same time, it made over $15,000 per month just selling t-shirts (3x+ more than ads).
Another one of our channels that had over 2.5 million subscribers was making about $10k per month on average at its peak. By selling our own digital products, we were able to make over $200k per month (20x YT ad revenue).
I know this was kind of a long answer but basically - for the YouTube creators who saw their channel as a business, not much has changed. YouTube ads continue to be a very small percentage of their overall revenue.
On the other hand, YouTube creators who were dependent on ad revenue are now feeling the pain. However, I actually see this as a blessing in disguise because it forces these creators to look at other ways of monetization and to view their channel/brand as a business rather than just a content creation machine.
> However, I actually see this as a blessing in disguise because it forces these creators to look at other ways of monetization and to view their channel/brand as a business rather than just a content creation machine.
Why would that be a blessing?
I'm just being curious. Are you talking from a business perspective or do you suggest that diverting work force to selling t-shirts instead of mere content creation is somehow more beneficial to humanity?
For a creator who is wholly dependent on ad revenue, The Algorithm is everything. It doesn't matter if anyone actually likes your content, just that they register ad impressions. You're naturally led towards clickbaity tactics and ephemeral content. The Algorithm has started to strongly favour topicality and frequent uploads, so creators who produce a small quantity of very high-quality videos are effectively being penalised. You need to follow every whim of YouTube's discoverability system and you're in deep trouble if CPMs suddenly decline.
If most of your income is from Patreon and merch, your incentives are completely different - your most profitable action is to convert a casual viewer into a loyal fan. You're incentivised to create meaningful content with deeper values than mere entertainment, because that's what induces people to buy a T-shirt or support you on Patreon. You have a stable and sustainable level of income, regardless of what The Algorithm decides to do this week.
I think that patronage and merchandising is overwhelmingly better for creators, consumers and the wider culture. You're beholden to nobody except your most loyal fans. You can make a living from doing something with very niche appeal, as long as there are a small number of people who are really passionate about it. You don't have to pay any attention to "virality" or "shareability", because view counts are practically meaningless to you. If you're doing something controversial or challenging, you don't have to worry about YouTube demonetising your content or sponsors pulling out.
On some level it's a boon to not tie one's livelihood so closely to a fickle and shady advertising industry. I agree that t-shirt selling doesn't sound like an amazing alternative, though.
Recording artists have had a fairly similar set up for quite some time; the label takes almost all the money from album sales, so the artists tend to make their money off live shows and merch.
I always wondered how much on average a Youtuber makes, per 100K or 1 Million video views. Any original Youtuber care to throw some light on this?
Articles like this paint a very rosy picture....
> Nowadays many young YouTubers can become flush with cash much more quickly and set up their own companies just to deal with the income from ad sales, marketing tie-ins, and personal appearances at live events.
But I'm having a hard time getting convinced. I launched a tech videos channel like what TechCrunch is doing now with CrunchReport, back in 2011. For video views of 10,000 or so, I was barely getting 10 / 15$ in ad revenue. A year later I shut it down as the cost of production was far outpacing the video ad revenues. I had a hard time getting sponsors also.
The article mention 1 of the MOST POPULAR Artist - “PewDiePie” -'s earnings of 8 Million, but this NYTimes story [ 2014 ] also features the same Olga Kay mentioned in OP, and also paints a much sober picture of how much money "Youtube Stars" really make from it, and all the efforts that go into it.
> “We are underpaid,” Ms. Kay says. “We are not only coming up with the commercial concept and tapping into a loyal audience, we are also doing marketing. We are doing all of these jobs for a relatively small fee.”
From watching a few reasonably popular channels over the years, even those folks have a hard time making money given the time investment put into video production. I think the EEVblog guy posted a video when he went full-time youtube and he's looking at making somewhere between $30-40k a year and he has about half a million subscribers with most video getting somewhere between 40k-100k views and he puts out 1-2 videos per week. Considering the intense time commitment to producing content, this really doesn't seem like much. So he's making what...about $500 per video? Let's say all in it takes two or three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible.
Another guy I like to follow, Lord Karnage, has similar number of subscribers, but most of his videos get far fewer views, 6k-10k and he's got over 4,000 videos up. I've heard an interview with him about his business and tbh, it doesn't sound great. He'd make more money panhandling playing video games on a street corner.
On the other hand, Simon and Martina, 1.2 million subs, between 300k-400k views per video and 4 videos a month, seem to be living a decent middle class life in Seoul and then Tokyo. No idea how much money they make, but they've had employees in the past to help them with their video production. Some calculators seem to claim they're probably making something a bit north of $100k.
One of the things that I find really disturbing is that, every so often, google will just "change" the payment computation and suddenly people who were putting 50-60 hour weeks into youtubing to make a fairly minimal living are suddenly seeing their income cut by huge percentages. Eventually everybody will figure out what changed and things will settle down, but there's a few weeks seemingly every year, where my subscription feed will be full of people complaining or shutting down channels.
> about $500 per video [..] that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible.
Don't forget to factor in that evergreen content will continuously bring in money, especially if you're funnelling in viewers from outside the YouTube algorithm. A video I made in 2014 is still the bulk of my YouTube income
Making money of old videos might change, if video suggestion algorithm prefer new content. Some suggest that it already have changed: https://youtu.be/03dTJ4nXkXw
Yeah, even with reduced discoverability evergreen content is very possible as long as you've got any exposure at all. I will often watch videos from the backlog of content creators I have newly discovered.
> One of the things that I find really disturbing is that, every so often, google will just "change" the payment computation and suddenly people who were putting 50-60 hour weeks into youtubing to make a fairly minimal living are suddenly seeing their income cut by huge percentages.
This is why a lot of people encourage youtubers to diversify away from ad-revenue. A youtuber that relies solely on ad-revenue is like a supplier with only one customer. They are at the complete mercy of the whims and competency of their single customer.
This is a large part of the reasoning behind patreon. Then there are people like CGP grey that diversify to podcasts, have patreon, sell merch and get paid-for promotions.
This is similar to how we moved away from depending wholly on newspapers, TV etc (old media monopolies) to Google, Youtube, Facebook (new media monopolies). Even though we can reach more audiences than ever before, 99% of it are being controlled by the Big Five.
> So he's making what...about $500 per video? Let's say all in it takes two or three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible
One thing that may be worth adding is that for Dave Jones in particular, he has other lines of income such as selling hardware (project kits, branded multimeters, T-shirts, etc) and ads on his popular webforum. The YouTube channel works as advertising for those businesses. So even if you don't make a good living off of the YouTube revenue, it may still make sense as a way of building a loyal customer base.
A lot of YouTubers also make a good chunk of their income on Patreon now as well.
Dave Jones is also taking $3500/mo on Patreon. Each of his individual revenue streams is fairly paltry, but they add up to a comfortable middle-class income. That kind of diversification is very healthy.
I guess it depends more on the niche than I assumed. I follow a lot of electronics channels, and YouTubers like techmoan and bigclive make $2,000+/mo on Patreon.
Beware, it's a power-law thing. I'm in the top 3.5% of all Patreon myself, and I'm barely making $650 a month from it. It's really dangerous to consider that as any more plausible than YouTube ad revenue: everything about it is set up as just another lottery ticket. I've been keeping track of the numbers for a year. The amount that constitutes the '1%' mark has been steadily declining even as the total population grows.
With Patreon, it's more properly considered as just another payment processor: the hope is that you'll build a functioning business and use it to handle people's credit card interactions.
Apparently (according to one YouTube channel I watch) the $/video figure is rather misleading as it doesn't take into account people's monthly spend caps.
So while CGPGrey might be making $20k/video for the first video, anyone with a (say) $5/month cap that paid $5 for the first video now pays nothing towards any videos released later in the month, potentially dropping the income substantially as more and more spending caps are hit as the month rolls on.
>>Let's say all in it takes two or three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible.
On the other hand, YT is populated by people from different countries. $20/hour is not great in US or UK, but where I'm from that's about 10x the minimum wage and 3-4x the median wage. There's plenty of foreign creators on YT and for them that amount of money places them firmly in the top income bracket.
Just from youtube ads it's about $1 per 1000 views, but can vary by a factor of 4 in either direction. Sponsoring, Patreon subscriptions, etc adds between a lot and nothing on top of that, depending on the kind of videos, the fanbase and a host of other factors.
For example, PewDiePie makes a video a day with ~4 million views each, which should net him around $1.5 million a year from ad revenue. I have no problem imagining him making another $6.5M through other means, being the most well-known youtuber. He also does heavy promotion of amazon affiliate links, which probably brings in a decent amount of money as well.
But of course normal people don't make a video a day and don't get millions of views on each video. I think most youtubers who manage to make it their day job get the majority of their money through Patreon subscriptions.
Of course, these days it's often supplemented by stuff like Patreon and separate sponsorship deals.
Another person of interest here might be Jim Sterling of The Jimquisition, since AFAIK his main income is through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jimquisition
Sterling doesn't take ad revenue of any kind, as a point of principle. It's a key part of his appeal - his independence as a journalist is unimpeachable, because he's funded solely by fans.
It really depends on a lot. I do 1 million views most months. Highest my earnings have ever been is $400. Last month I made $170. Most of my views are from an African country though, so we're talking low CPCs and fill rates.
I don't think there is very much money in the integrated pre-roll ads on Youtube. The real money is in sponsorship deals and live reads or pushing viewers to sites that that have a clearer revenue model for content creators like Patreon. However those generally require a decent sized following before they open up as potential options.
I remember a criticism of the adage "It's a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll" (or any pop music). It's actually a very short way to the top, or you wouldn't have so many 20-year-olds topping the charts. There's just a hell of a lot of competition.
> Nowadays many young YouTubers can become flush with cash much more quickly ...
The problem is that people conflate "more individuals are making it big" with "individuals have a better chance of making it big." The number of contributors trying to make it into a career is far, far larger than it was, and has increased far more quickly than the number of contributors actually making a lot of money.
> I always wondered how much on average a Youtuber makes, per 100K or 1 Million video views. Any original Youtuber care to throw some light on this?
I believe the reason this is so hard to find out is that it's in their contracts that they can't disclose their earnings publicly. Plus, their revenue comes from ads shown on their videos and advertisers pay varying amounts depending on how in-demand that kind of content is.
Best bet is going to be estimates from places like SocialBlade.
And that won't even take into account things like endorsements and merch, which is how people like PewDiePie make a lot of their money, nor will it take into account costs of production or other things like management or an MCN.
>I believe the reason this is so hard to find out is that it's in their contracts that they can't disclose their earnings publicly.
YouTube isn't exactly enthusiastic about people sharing their revenue data, but they're not stopping anyone. Most creators choose not to, purely for reasons of commercial sensitivity. Some do, most notably CGP Grey and Dave Jones of EEVBlog. Dave Jones had an average eCPM of $1.36 pre-adpocalypse; CGP Grey's post-adpocalypse video had an estimated eCPM of $1.11.
I've used this one, and a few others that were around back in 2011. All were waaaay off, i.e. would report 500% to 1000% more than what I know I am actually making after entering the view counts, subs and other details.
Not ad revenue, but this year a person who is famous primarily for their YouTube makeup tutorials made >$1m when their collaborative kit with a cosmetic brand sold several hundred thousand units (and sold out) in less than an hour.
Source: know someone who worked on the project and was involved in the launch.
I have heard around a $2 CPA. If you're doing tech unboxing videos (possible higher purchasing intent) more, if you're doing abstract poems you wrong, possibly less.
Jordan Peterson is making nearly half a million dollars from Patreon alone. And that too making videos on supposedly "boring" topics like mythology and psychology.
YouTuber here, it feels like the party is over. The viewership is there but it seems like the list of things we can't do or speak about is getting bigger and bigger. You literally cannot mention war; your video will be demonetized.
Au contraire, I think the effect that advertisers have on what can and can't be said via popular channels is something we should all care about.
It's easy to say, "Just stop advertising," but producing valuable content is expensive. Advertiser-funded outlets are at a tremendous financial advantage, and that translates directly into higher viewership. Consequently, we get the vast majority of our news, information, and opinions from advertiser-funded institutions.
Furthermore, the majority of advertising dollars come from clients who share similar attributes with each other (rich, corporate, favoring the status quo, etc.), so their perspectives and agendas tend to align.
The result is that contradictory perspectives are pushed to the sidelines, no matter how correct, logical, popular, or morally superior they may be. The fact that people aren't allowed to discuss war on YouTube is something we should all be concerned about. It's de facto propaganda.
This applies to more traditional media, too, not just the internet. There are all sorts of topics that advertisers won't "allow" even the mainstream media to dwell on for too long.
On the other hand, it also does a good job of removing what I might call accidental propaganda. Most youtube videos are not even skin deep, running off of one article in the news they read, and some youtube person is going to have almost no real understanding when making a video about Syria for example. By removing the people who are only there to drive clicks and revenues, I can probably get better results when I search for a serious topic. Maybe some topics should be left to pure enthusiasts.
In particular, consider the thought experiment presented in the second video: If YouTube's algorithm solely promoted car videos, then car videos would be all that are uploaded to YouTube. The algorithm is the content.
Even though it happens to align with what you like right now, the bias should be concerning.
>If YouTube's algorithm solely promoted car videos, then car videos would be all that are uploaded to YouTube.
That's assuming that people only upload videos on Youtube to monetize them. Given that uploading videos is basically free I'm sure there'd be no shortage of non-car videos. Actually if I recall correctly youtube didn't have any monetization for many years when it started?
What you'd probably lose is high production value original content, although I suspect that many of those content producers might still break even if they have other ways to monetize their content.
If there is significant amounts of content that has been overzealously blocked by google, then there are advertisers that want access to that (currently) lower-valued inventory. The value of that inventory should normalize based on the number of advertisers who want access to it.
If YouTube doesn't make it available to those advertisers who would accept it, someone else should. That is, if there is (a) enough inventory and (b) enough advertisers (and if not it's an immaterial issue)
Keep in mind that what's material to Google is significantly larger than what may be material for a small company. Google is focused on finding their next $10B in revenue.
It is up to you find people to support your opinion. If what you want to say is important but not commercially to youtube, use the internet. There is no lock in.
This is an excellent justification for something like Patreon, and for all the speech that YouTube must know is a nonstarter for advertisers, they should integrate or replicate Patreon for their creators. Not as a replacement for ads, but as a way to enable all of the content that belongs on the internet.
Patreon is good when it works, but it's got even more of an uneven 'curve' than ad revenue. If you're not a massive celebrity with a huge following, your Patreon will at best pay the equivalent of a minimum wage job and more likely pay far less than that.
For example, based on some channels I subscribe to:
Boundary Break has 178,000 subscribers, and makes $844 a month on Patreon.
A Start Show has 500,000 subscribers, making $429 a month on Patreon.
Source Gaming makes $80 a month with 4000 subscribers and Top Hat Gaming Man $120 a month with about 7000.
They all make good content, but they certainly wouldn't make enough to live on through Patreon alone if they were required to.
And even that's more money than a lot of creators make from it. I know good YouTube creators whose Patreon accounts bring them either literally nothing or between $5 and $15 a month.
In other words, Patreon basically never makes as much money for a creator as YouTube ads and monetisation does, and even the best cases (people with millions of fans) make at best a lower middle class income from it.
How much time are those individuals putting into their channels? I know quality videos take a lot of effort, but is it consistently 40+ hours a week?
It's not dangerous, no longer requires expensive equipment, rarely involves a commute. I think most people would rather play or talk about games than flip burgers.
The problem with creative work is that the fruits of your labour are nonlinear. A single dumb video made in the spirit of the moment might get a million views, while one that you toiled over for days receives only a fraction of that. Of course doing nothing gets you nothing, but using hours-worked as a yardstick probably won't work.
This too. Content creation is a volatile thing, and it's pretty damn difficult to tell whether your audience (or the internet in general) will really appreciate your work.
You can try and migitate this uncertainly. By looking at trends, seeing what videos are popular, making content about whatever the new big thing is at the moment and by putting a lot of effort into your writing or production values.
But at the end of the day, it's at least much luck as skill and time that determines your success. I've seen people who are terrible video creators get hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers simply by being in the right place at the right time. For instance, the Irate Gamer got big not because he was a particularly talented individual, but because he was a family friendly Angry Video Game Nerd alternative in a time when the nerd was getting super popular and YouTube wanted to present others like him.
Others got popular because a big news site posted about their work, or a creator with millions of fans like PewDiePie mentioned them on social media or their channel ended up in a related channels box on a large channel or because a bunch of people on Reddit came across them and thought their work was good.
And it can easily go wrong for successful or skilled people too. Doug Walker thought Demo Reel was going to be the next big thing, but it failed miserably to the point he had to bring back the Nostalgia Critic to keep his business going. I know a pro game designer with decades of experience in the industry who made a series about his speciality on YouTube... and squeaks by with about 300 subscribers. There have been more amazing looking websites and apps than I can name which tanked hard while their worse looking, worse functioning competitors took off.
Content creation (and perhaps creation in general) is a volatile, very hard to predict thing that has made fools out of experts and millionaires out of fools at an almost equal rate.
As described in the article, it takes a ton of time. Often editing the video can easily take twice as long as shooting it, which itself can take much longer than the final video length even for something as simple as a talk show.
There's a lot of work that goes into any decent show and it climbs exponentially with quality.
I've found editing video is often anywhere from 4:1 to 8:1 ratio (edit:shooting) depending on how much effort goes into the video. This probably comes down with experience
From what I've seen, a lot of time. These people aren't just discussing anything about games or what not, they're actively researching stories no one else has covered online yet. For example, the Boundary Break channel is all about reverse engineering games to disable camera restrictions and take them outside the game world.
That takes a lot of time to set up, especially as each game needs to be treated as its own thing due to how they're coded. Probably dozens of hours with the community on Discord figuring how the camera format works, then even more using it to explore the hell out of the game to find interesting stuff before even making the video.
Or in the case of Slopes Game Room/Guru Larry/Top Hat Gaming Man, looking into game series and games either from decades past (which have very little documentation online) or aspects of games people didn't know about. It's only thanks to them that stuff like Drivergate (a scandal where a video game magazine publisher gave artificially inflated reviews to a broken game to get the reviews out early) came to the surface or got added to Wikipedia in the first place.
A lot of time goes into these videos, it's just a lot more of it likely goes to research and journalism than editing.
OTOH, Binging with Babish is making $9000 a month with a million subscribers. In general, monetizing off nerds is tough. Once you move outside of nerddom, people tend to be more willing to fork out money for goods.
I just checked and S/V Delos makes $10,000 a video. They do have something really unusual and unique going on though, sailing around the world and all. I would also imagine that they are watched by an older demographic probably with a lot of disposable income.
SV Delos is one of the first "Watch Us Sail Around the World" You Tube Channels. They got in earlier and they do go to some great places and have some great adventures. Most sailing channels are, "Look at us, we're in the Bahamas, drinking beer!"
It also helps that Delos has a great crew and they do rotate in a group of good looking women who don't have problems with getting topless or naked and it not have it be sexual.
There's Steemit. What's interesting is that the ads take care of themselves since you can buy as many upvotes as you want and all the other creators who get legit upvotes get paid out of that.
Advertiser friendly also means having considerable audience numbers. If I could hazard a guess, I'd say most of the big YouTube channels have built their numbers up with edginess as their differentiator and they worry about losing that.
Currently you're either allowed to host ads, or you're not.
The compromise would be to have a separate pool you get assigned to where advertisers can choose to use your videos. That way a gun manufacturer can choose to advertise on a channel that advocates gun violence (an unsavoury example, I know).
That's the other big problem IMHO, all of the content is being compressed and converted to a very pro corporate consumerist culture view. Don't talk negatively, don't use bad words, don't ruffle any feathers, or you'll lose whatever pittance you're getting.
This is doubly weird because YouTube has always had (and still has) one of the most atrociously toxic comments sections on the Internet.
Yes: censorship and ads. Both inevitable I suppose, but irksome in the extreme. For instance, it's getting harder to find content by speakers I follow due to repackaging and re-uploading of their older content for ad revenue by third parties.
This is doubly weird because YouTube has always had (and still has) one of the most atrociously toxic comments sections on the Internet.
Comments aren't monetised content, however; which makes them, in some sense, rather more honest and genuine. We'd see something very different if people were posting comments to be monetised in some way or another (although I can't see how that could ever happen.)
This has nothing to do with Youtube and everything to do with advertisers (and agencies and other marketing related forces) that do not want to be next to content that is not brand-safe. That is well within their right and since they pay the bills, they set the rules.
I personally don't see why all advertisers would want to shy away from war. I'd guess an ad for the next call of duty game would probably run better on average on such videos.
Heck, it should be clear that advertisers don't choose what videos they advertise on, so why should they even care what their ads run on? I really don't buy the complaint that 'GM is sponsoring terrorism' when an ad of theirs is ran on an ISIS video.
Veritasium recently made a video [1] talking about how the site today seems to favor quantity over quality. Many of the people in the comments there think YouTube's recommendations are to blame saying they're often not relevant. What have been your experiences?
Yeah, the recommendations on YouTube are horrible. Google is a very hard company to understand sometimes. They're attempting to make self-driving cars with AI, yet they can't recommend relevant videos.
The recommendations make a lot more sense if you assume that they don't especially care about content-driven relevance and instead just care about maximizing the expected value of how many people watch another video (all hail "engagement").
A self driving car seems easier in some ways. Just make it not crash.
Recommendations for millions of people and millions of videos on the other hand. Liking a video is subjective, for some channels I don't like half their content yet I am a regular viewer of some of their series.
Personally I am quite happy with their recommendations, even if I don't watch half of it.
Maybe easier in some senses, but cars are life and death. If 1 out of 10 of your recommendations are bad, no big deal. If the car misclassifies obstacles in the road at even 1/100th that rate, not acceptable.
Very little of YouTube feels genuine at all anymore. For as much as I can't stand the middle schoolers vlogs, at least I know that's an actual person with something to actually say. If you go to YouTube's home page with no account, literally all you see is promoted content, usually by a mix of record labels, TV stations, some "company" that makes comedy sketches or whatever, and one of those channels that does the "worlds blankiest blank" video lists.
There's very little regular people on there anymore, and IMHO, that is their biggest problem. It's just become a slightly different version of television, with all the big money, shallow personalities, derivative content and problems that comparison implies.
Edit: self correcting, there are plenty of regular people on there, they just never get seen organically.
Isn't that pretty much what happened to eBay? Used to be a community of people selling their old computer parts and Magic The Gathering cards, and now it's devolved into Yet Another Distribution Channel where faceless companies offer their lineup of products.
As someone who is in the business, the one thing that has had this effect is YouTube's drive towards brand safety. Brand safety always has a material effect on an advertising company's bottom line, and YouTube being loss-making, they've been going full blast in the past two years to make the site as ad-friendly as possible. One thing about brand safety though: it's expensive to achieve. Brand safety = high production value, vanilla content. This means high costs coupled with slow growth. This heavily favours the established or well-funded media entity. The 'genuine' camcorder-weilding film student can only afford to try this YouTube thing out for a few months before going broke. With this constraint on time and money, the one-man shows resort to cheaply produced, edgy content to grow as fast as possible and now they're being slaughtered for this approach.
I've previously listed the various YouTube channels that I subscribe to [1]. All of them are "regular people", and nearly all of them I've found organically, by YT's suggested content. There are many others who I know of but don't follow because I have only a limited amount of time I'm willing to spend on watching videos.
I agree, though, that almost none of this ever appears on the front page. I posit that this is because they are relatively niche interests: what I see on the trending list is pop-culture content, which is so called because it appeals to a very wide demographic—and thus would be expected to appear on the default front page, precisely because there is no additional information to go by on more specific content that the viewer might be interested in.
"you do the job of at least five people. You have to be creative; you have to be a writer, be a performer, an editor, a director, a marketer."
This is my problem. I keep building things, both hardware and software, and post them to Hackaday and Show HN, respectively. Cool things, like a magnetic audio connector or a big data project of 20,000 restaurant menus translated from Chinese.
But I can't do the marketing. I have no idea how to make money out of this. Finishing a project and posting it is exciting, but then I'm always let down by the fact that nobody cares.
I'm a senior marketer. The short answer is yes, you can market without spending. The slightly longer answer is that time is money and those forms of marketing often take lots of time, and take time away from building the product.
There's lots of free info out there, but it can be hard to separate the signal from the noise. Noise in this case often being gurus and blogs trying to get you to buy info products or make a purchase via affiliate link.
Start simple by making a site to sell your product and add a way to monetize it. Get engaged in communities that have problems your product solves. You can then reach out to people to get product feedback and maybe a sale.
But to be honest, at some point odds are you will need to spend money. If the issue is you simply cannot afford it, that's fine... bootstrap with non-paid channels.
If your issue is that you don't want to pay for anything on principle, you're going to have a rough time. There reality for most businesses is that it takes money to make money.
If you have any specific questions or want to chat, feel free to contact me via my profile. While I charge a consulting rate for hands-on work or analysis, I'm always happy to answer general marketing questions, point people in the right direction to reputable resources, etc. for free without any pressure to consult.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply! And thanks for not using an affiliate link, unlike some commenters below.
"add a way to monetise it" - do you mean Google ads? Affiliate links? The same thing we just said is "noise"?
"don't want to pay on principle" is part of it. I have a maximum wage - my visa and work contract do not allow me to do other paid work. I'm not allowed to have any revenue, so I want to minimise my costs. My "portfolio" feels useless if I can't find anyone else to use it though, so I know I need to do marketing, I just don't know how.
That's an interesting challenge--I've never encountered it. Monetization can occur through a variety of ways. Ads and affiliate links tend to be fairly low margin. Personally, I'd focus on productizing your offering, and trying to find a way to sell it as a service for recurring revenue.
That said, I don't know how you can actually make a business if you're not allowed to have any revenue. Can you clarify on what your end goal is? I might be missing something with that.
My end goal is just to make my work useful to someone else.
I do these projects because I want to. I'm going to keep building stuff, because that's what I enjoy. I just feel useless when I think how much time I spend on it, and then nobody cares.
Existing Chinese textbooks don't have colours for tones, pinyin, and literal translations. So I decided to make my own software to do that. I can sit back and judge the textbook authors (saying their stuff sucks), but that doesn't help anyone. So I made my own better one! But the only person who is helped by my work is me. It's not going to change the world if I'm the only person who uses it. Do I have to be a business in order to give stuff away for free?
That helps me understand a bit better. I'm not clear on the legalities of your situation, but it seems like you might benefit from looking into educational institutions and other community resources to see if they could make use of your work.
If you are giving stuff away for free you don't need to be a business, but if what you are giving away has costs associated with that, you need some way of covering those. If not by yourself, then with the help and sponsorship of another org.
Am [well, at least currently] a CMO - reach out if you want a basic intro in marketing stuff, looking at forming it into some sort of guide/course to sell, but ping me a list of questions and will try and pass on some tips and links to get you cracking.
But as others have said, if you're wanting to gain traction for something, it doesn't start with "cool project" it starts with "solves a problem". Cool is great, and amazing and the personal satisfaction is priceless - but if you want to price it, it's a different approach.
Of course you can market something without physical cash investment, the flipside is then obviously a time investment.
All advertising is a form of marketing, but not all marketing is advertising. Marketing tactics usually fit on an axis between cash-poor/time-rich and cash-rich/time-poor. Pick which on you can optimise for.
Take a look at "Inbound Marketing[0]", it's a good book that shows you how to gain an audience using social networking tools such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter etc. It's an old book in terms of how fast social media moves, but it's logic still applies.
Well if you can't afford to purchase some books on the subject (which are helpful in their own rights), then I would suggest spending time looking at Blogs that specialise in the subject and check out Reddit's marketing and entrepreneur subreddits. They are really helpful and you can ask what ever questions you need.
Don't ever stop doing exactly what you're doing. You've created a marvelous portfolio demonstrating your skills, and employers can look at those projects and understand the caliber of developer they're about to give lots of money to make cool things for them.
Also, sometimes the joy of a project is just bringing it to completion, for personal satisfaction. Passion projects can be just that! They don't have to make money. If you are going to make money though, and you're pretty sure you have a solid idea, perhaps reach out to someone with marketing skills to help you get the word out. If it's not your strong suit that's okay! You keep doing what you're good at, and let someone else shine at the tough stuff.
Do it for yourself. If you're doing it for the attention, that's a pretty tough row to hoe. If you get lucky enough to attract an audience, then you ride that wave!
At a minimum, producing quality content demonstrates mastery of a topic, and that increases your credibility as a subject matter expert, which may be supporting evidence that you're worth that large sums of money you ask someone to pay at a future date.
I enjoy building things. I'm good at back-end programming and hardware hacking. I'm bad at art and marketing.
Even making a "portfolio" requires everything I do to have a pretty GUI and a nice website. For many of my scripts, that kind of thing just isn't suitable.
For my 20k Chinese restaurant menu project, I got a few likes on Facebook. One person said I should make an app. But what kind of app? Android, iOS, Mac, Windows? What is the app supposed to do that the website can't already do? Even if I make an app, how am I supposed to tell people about it?
Paying for Facebook ads or Google ads seems like a waste of money, because even if the site gets more views, it's for free, so it won't pay for itself. This also restricts the type of project I do - I can't afford to pay for a server, so I code everything in client-side JavaScript and host on Github.
One more clarifying question -- it sounds to me like what drives you is to solve problems that you find interesting and challenging, and to have a decent number of people try it out and hopefully give you props for what you've built, how useful it is, how cool it is, etc. it sounds like "money" isn't a primary or secondary motivator for you, but might be used as a proxy for what you're really interested in?
I'm asking this because imo really clarifying your desires is a prerequisite for nailing down the right path to realizing these wishes.
That's right. I do projects that interest me. I see problems in life. For example, not being able to read menus, making a map of the range of an electric bike, etc.
I build solutions: my own Chinese translator + 20k menus. An offline map program that lets me draw a circle of a given radius. I have lots of these little projects.
Money isn't possible, because I have a maximum wage. My visa & contract don't allow me to do side work. I wish that other people would benefit from my work, but I don't want to spend money to buy users, because they won't be paying it back later.
So I've had this idea for a large project that would be a great free service for people, and be great for my portfolio. Then, I read this post. It became clear that hunting for paid work would likely have a far greater return on my time.
Work with a friend that you trust! My co-founder is brilliant at using tech to optimize operations, and talented-but-indifferent when it comes to marketing. I like selling things. It works out well :)
I've always wondered, who (demographically) actively goes to YouTube and watches videos/subs to channels?
Among my friend group (mid-20s tech people in Seattle for the most part), YouTube is a non-entity. It never comes up in conversation. I personally never go to the front page of youtube to actually look at anything, I'm always searching for something specific. OTOH, we talk plenty about Netflix and podcasts.
As a counter-anecdote, frivolous as it is, most of my mates and I are early-30s tech people and most of us sub to channels and actively go to YouTube to watch them.
I'd say quite a number of people here would really enjoy Numberphile[1] and Computerphile[2] and I'd heartily recommend subscribing to and keeping up with them. I'm also heavily interested in tabletop and video gaming and I keep up to date with both of those through a combination of YouTube and podcast subscriptions.
I'm 37. I subscribe to a number of channels. Really, if you have an interest, someone probably makes videos about it and puts them up on youtube. For example, picking a channel I subscribe to that might appeal to a generic HN taste, take a look at https://www.youtube.com/user/ThoughtbotVideo
You're right, there are some incredibly niche channels around. I collect poker chips and there's even a channel for that: Jon Hobby's Great Poker Chip Adventure[1].
The "default" content on YouTube is indeed low-quality crap like what you mention, but there is a lot of great content on there.
On YouTube, you can learn about any skill, the quality of "teachers" varies greatly, but there really are some exceptionally good ones out there.
I'd suggest you check out some of these channels
1. Adam Neely - a (bass) musician, he hosts Q/A videos very regularly, responding to comments in previous videos. The quality of his comments section is unlike anything I've ever seen before, real, in-depth questions, insights, recommendations etc... Exceptional channel in so many ways
2. 3blue1brown - a mathematician who focuses on helping viewers build an intuition for various dry mathematical concepts.
3. Yoshiki Oshima - this one is very niche, but I mention it because there are uncountably many high-quality niche channels. His channel basically archives old computer research videos, lots of stuff on Alan Kay, Ivan Sunderland, PARC, Douglas Engelbart, Seymour Papert and others.
Many many many many many channels with different focuses out there. YouTube has a lot more to offer than what the frontpage shows.
I'm a software developer in my mid-20s and I subscribe to and regularly watch videos on YouTube. It's probably in the top 10 most visited sites for me.
I mainly subscribe to woodworking and programming channels. It's generally something where I'm hoping to learn new skills and techniques, and for that, YouTube is incredible.
I also purchased my first home last year (100 years old) and channels like This Old House have been incredibly helpful with many maintenance tasks.
Same here. YouTube is really good for specialist "common knowledge." Woodworking can monetize this, so it's a natural fit for YouTube. But even in non-monetizable domains, it's useful. It has been helpful for various home projects. For instance, electrical techniques like pulling wire through conduit, or car or appliance fixes.
I am 36, living in Norway working as an analyst. We do not have regular TV and my wife and I usually watch youtube if we watch something at all.
The evenings we have spare time, we fire up the PS3 or PS4 and play something. Much more engaging than TV :)
The kids use netflix etc though, but also a lot of youtube.
There is one thing I miss about youtube from the earlier days though.
People uploading and creating stuff because they wanted to do it, not because they wanted to make money.
It makes such a huge difference.
I still follow a handful of channels that don't feel like they exist to advertise/monetize. They are far too passionate about their content matter for that to be the case. That said I hope the creators are being compensated well for their efforts.
Many of them are probably on Patreon even if they don't shill it constantly in the videos. If you enjoy their content you should try to give them something - I follow several content creators who make over a thousand dollars a month, almost entirely from $1-5/video donations.
I watch videos on Youtube all the time (literally just came back from watching one).
My main hobby is board games. An excellent way to see how a new game plays is by watching videos of other people playing it and giving reviews on it. The hobby isn't big enough that you'll see shows about this on mainstream TV, but pretty much anyone into modern board games I'd almost guarantee uses Youtube on a regular basis.
A few of the bigger channels just for board games include: The Dice Tower, Rahdo Runs Through, DriveThruReviews, Shut Up Sit Down, the BoardGameGeek, and Game Night. Incidentally I was just in Columbus, Ohio for one of the larger board game conventions (Origins) and spotted most of these people working or hanging out.
I watch tons of youtube, easily as much as other media. But I've spent a lot of time over the years curating my subscription list. I don't really talk about youtube with anybody unless it's to search for something very specific like you mention. I think it's because "my" youtube is such a map to my interests that it's likely to be almost entirely non-interesting to anybody else, so there's really no point.
I mostly watch youtube to unwind and not think so hard, a few I tend to get really into:
On cooking & food:
jastownsendandson - 18th century history and recipes
foodwishes - nice succinct no fuss recipes, focus on the recipes
TabiEats - casual/fast food reviews and stuff from Japan
gundog4314 - reviews of military rations
Global news and Culture:
PBS NewsHour - public news, nice balanced and thoughtful news without lots of histrionics
ARIRANG TV - korean state cultural TV, mostly because I have Korean family members, but some interesting shows from time to time also "ARIRANG NEWS" for regional news and local Korean politics and ARIRANG CULTURE for more specific Korean arts stuff
Great Big Story - hard to explain, but brilliant short videos from all over that make you feel better about the world after a hard day
Big Think - another hard to explain channel
TheJapanChannel - mostly interesting vignettes from Japan, I find them kind of soothing for some reason
Talk to me in Korean - supposed to be a language learning course, but interesting insights into Korean culture, sometimes some interesting walks around different parts of Korea, skip the language stuff and enjoy the rest
Abroad In Japan - an Englishman in Japan, very dry humor, endlessly entertaining
Korean Englishman - an Englishman in Korea, less dry humor, also endlessly entertaining
OsiyoTV - Cherokee Nation TV, well produced show on Cherokee topics
2hearts1seoul - nice fairly calm looks at stuff in Korea
NHKWorld - Japanese national shows
Simon and Martina - two hyper hipsters in Asia, I like them, but they can be polarizing
TheKoreaSociety - serious talks on Korea and regional issues
Retrocomputing and gaming and stuff:
Kim Justice - some incredible histories of the UK computer gaming scene, fantastically produced all around, an actual hidden gem on youtube
TNT Amusements - business advertisement for a company that refurbs arcade games, fun crew and can be entertaining and informative from time to time
Pixelmusement - old games, my favorite show is "Shovelware Diggers"...strangely relaxing review of crapware dos and early windows games from a 1000 games CD.
Retro Core - English reviews of retro games from Japan. The guy who does it is kind of infectious and opinionated, but has a definite voice.
Computerphile - interesting old to new light computing topics
The Ben Heck Show - various electronics and retro gaming/computing topics, serious hardware hacking
Top Hat Gaming Man - reviews of various games and stuff, puts a bit of effort into production
Grand Illusions - weird toys and nick-nacks, infectious host
Techmoan - odd old things, just watch it
EEVblog - intense teardowns of everything
Game Sack - great, well produced retro gaming
Metaljesusrocks - another great, well produced retro gaming show
Matt Barton - his show "Matt Chat" has interviews with some absolute gaming legends, amazing stuff
Jeremy Parish - one of the "old men" of gaming journalism, has lots of on-line presence, but does tons of interesting reviews
Damn! That's a lot. Thanks for the descriptions for all of them too. About 6 channels seem interesting to me. I'm not into cars (that's what happens when you blow most of your early lucky web money on a Porsche and then go broke :p), or cooking or Asian culture beyond listening to Kpop. But still seems like I might like the handful of ones that seem interesting to me.
Haha for sure. I've already found 2 other niche YT channels that look interesting. Also it's just that it prob took you a long time to write your whole list haha.
Anec-data-ly: it seems to be very popular with children and teens. The sons and nephews of several friends really look forward to the next episodes of their favourite YouTube series. Don't know if girls have the same degree of interest, though.
My girlfriend's son (12) & daughter (10) watch YouTube more than they watch TV. Her son is into gaming and watches mostly gaming channels. Her daughter likes some of the younger YouTubers who cater to her age/demographic in content. I hear them around their friends and that is a lot of what they talk about.
For another datapoint, I regularly watch and subscribe to YouTube and occasionally podcasts (only when driving), but have no interest in Netflix. User generated content is usually more real and interesting to me.
I wondered the same thing and asked on a popular post a while back[1]. That thread might interest you. Personally I've been spending more and more of my leisure time on YouTube, particularly on travel vlogs.
My fiancée is 28 and loves watching YT. From Cinema Sins and horror movie reviews, over makeup / hair styling tips, to talk shows and music videos. She's an astrophysicist and works as a data scientist.
I, 31 and a computer scientist working as a software dev, on the other hand, hate almost everything that's not in text form.
People don't discuss "youtube" - they talk about specific channels and subscriptions as they would tv shows or movies.
Because of vast amount of content on youtube, outside of the top channels in any specific topic, you might not even share any subscriptions with any of your friends.
I really find the 'trending' page of youtube to be horrible. However, the personalized suggestions are great, youtube is pretty good at showing me stuff I want to see. Combine this with a few channels I actively follow, and there goes another afternoon.
Honestly it depends on you and your group. My group doesn't care for Netflix or podcasts, but we watch a lot of YouTube channels revolving around video games.
As others have said, YouTube is huge with people around ten years younger than you and more.
But I also go there for lectures. All sorts of conferences and talks and debates and lectures are up on youtube, it's just a matter of using the correct search terms. Most serious videos I watch are related to politics so then my challenge is in stepping outside of the mainstream people. No Noam Chomsky for example. When I want to challenge my views I might go to Bill Kristol's channel which is small but good or lookup some libertarian or alt-right stuff. Youtube is one of the greatest things about our current technological age, it just requires a bit of finesse to get past all the crap.
I agree with you. I think the site caters mostly to children and young teenagers. Most popular videos, those shown on the home page, are of guys talking to a camera loudly and making silly jokes about videogames and current events, or very bad pop music.
If you log in and watch what you like, what shows up on your page really adapts. You can think of it sort of like reddit, many siloed communities. I wouldn't judge what you can get out of it by the default front page.
If you think that the front page is representative of all the content on youtube, you're very much mistaken. There are swathes of content for a vast array of topics. Just accept that you're not a majority-demographic viewer and ignore the front page pitched to them.
I'm in my mid 40s and the youtube front page just offers me punk and 80s thrash metal videos plus some windsurfing and mountain biking - suits me fine.
I get a weird culture shock whenever I ever see what it looks like to my kids though.
I really wish they had got a hold of Ray William Johnson to ask him about the rise and fall off the equals three show. He was YouTube's number 1 for a long time. His timeline defined the drama around all aspects of YouTube. From being a trail Blazer to personal tolls on life to partnering with networks to make things "better" to the complete meltdown of a partnership. Would have made for an interesting perspective.
I don't how how it affects "original" stars but the "adpocalypse"[1] + the move to "punish" infrequent uploaders[2] are sure to have interesting long-term effects.
Hmm. I want to lash out because I feel like this is a total thread hijacking, but I am curious how some of these OG youtube stars are reacting to these new developments.
I'm not a YouTuber but I do subscribe to a dozen of channels. It seems to me that the sustainable channels are making their money from donations either via PayPal or Patreon not so much from ads which was my long-standing belief.
MKBHD seems to be this generation's Walter Mossberg: he's a trusted reviewer who goes into the appropriate level of detail, given his audience. I have no idea what he makes but he drives a Tesla and shoots in 4k and 8k on pretty high-end cameras. Seems to be doing well enough, anyway.
Well I'm mostly a user, and I've got to say that YouTube still wins on the technical front.
It remembers my position when I watch a video part way through, they have an app for just about every device you can get, they have a subscription service that removes all ads, it supports everything from 144p to 4k, it has livestreaming with multi-camera support, it supports 360 videos, has annotations, subtitles, speed changing, and more.
Compared to the next best thing, YouTube is still winning by a lot for me as a user.
Twitch Streaming. Why count on $1 per 1000 views (incidentally this means you value your viewers at 0.1c a pop) when you could stream live on Twitch and regularly receive $5-100 donations from fans who genuinely love you.
Usually what you see is about $1 per 1000 views (CPM) for US creators. This number can be much lower depending on which country you are from - US is the highest.
Since "adpocalypse" (advertisers pulling out of YT ads) and some other relevant events, CPM has gone down significantly for everybody. While we were making about $1 CPM a couple years ago, we are now doing about $0.50 CPM.
With that said, most business-savvy YouTube creators have known from the beginning that YT ads are a drop in the bucket compared to the potential of revenue that you can make using other monetization methods. Patreon is one way, but merch, live shows, and digital products are examples of other ways that a creator can make way more money from their following.
For example, one of our channels with nearly 1 million subsribers only made about $4000 per month on YT ads at its peak. During that same time, it made over $15,000 per month just selling t-shirts (3x+ more than ads).
Another one of our channels that had over 2.5 million subscribers was making about $10k per month on average at its peak. By selling our own digital products, we were able to make over $200k per month (20x YT ad revenue).
I know this was kind of a long answer but basically - for the YouTube creators who saw their channel as a business, not much has changed. YouTube ads continue to be a very small percentage of their overall revenue.
On the other hand, YouTube creators who were dependent on ad revenue are now feeling the pain. However, I actually see this as a blessing in disguise because it forces these creators to look at other ways of monetization and to view their channel/brand as a business rather than just a content creation machine.